Tag: Ann Garrison

Rwanda arrested presidential candidate Victoire Ingabiré Umuhoza on Wednesday, April 21, at her home in Kigali, and her Rwandan support team thank pressure from the international community for her surprise release on bail the next day. Supporters should be ready, should Rwanda Greens candidate Frank Habineza be arrested, to post the news and call for his release.

Godwin Agaba, Rwandan correspondent for the African Great Lakes regional outlet 256.com, is now in hiding, though still reporting. This week Godwin Agaba confirmed that Rwanda’s presidential election is effectively closed; all the viable opposition has been excluded.

Today, 62 percent of the people packed into Rwanda’s prisons have been charged or convicted of genocide-related crimes and some of the country’s most admired leaders are being accused of the “genocide ideology” thought crime. Most prominent are Victoire Ingabire, Kagame’s strongest competitor for the presidency, and Paul Rusesabagina, the hero portrayed in the film “Hotel Rwanda,” who is charged with “Double Genocide Theory.”

In case anyone needed further evidence that President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda is the Pentagon’s proxy, 140 Rwandan police are about to undertake special training before heading to Haiti, as reported in the Rwanda New Times, because, according to Rwandan Police Chief Edmund Kayiranga, “Rwanda wants to be involved in promoting peace in other countries” and, if need be, they would send more peacekeepers to other countries.

If Rwanda's three viable opposition parties are allowed to register and participate in free and fair elections, they have a good chance, in coalition, of defeating Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) Party. Those three parties condemned the Feb. 19 deadly grenade attacks in Kigali, calling them “an attempt to instill fear in the population” prior to Rwanda’s August presidential election.

1) Lennar paid federal lobbyists $240,000 to win them a $320 million cash bailout characterized as a retroactive tax refund. 2) In the accounting for its fourth quarter report, announced on Jan. 7, 2010, Lennar used $284.9 million of the $320 million to offset its quarter losses. 3) Lennar then reported the remaining $35.6 million as profit, earned income. 4) Taxpayers, yet again, footed the bill.

At the close of 2008 and throughout 2009, Americans watched our federal government reward the reckless multinational financial sector with trillions of dollars for causing the worst hardship since the Great Depression. San Franciscans and Californians joined in the agony but few understood that both San Francisco and California have come up with their own bailout for one of the major players in the meltdown, the South Florida based Lennar Corp.

On Friday, Nov. 13, the London Guardian reported a "Huge rise in birth defects in Fallujah," Iraq. I sent the news to KPFA Radio 94.1FM Weekend News anchor Anthony Fest, along with contact info for Bob Nichols, San Francisco Bay View newspaper correspondent and winner of a 2004 Project Censored Award for his reporting on the U.S. military's use of depleted uranium weapons in Iraq and consequent radiation poisoning.

In their fight against the push to privatize their state park, Bayview Hunters Point activists are fighting the privatization of California as hard as anyone I know. They’re fighting for all of us, so I hope that other Californians who don’t want to see the whole state on the auction block will contact their Assembly representatives and ask them to vote against Senate Bill 792.

Upon her release and return, Cynthia McKinney spoke to WBAIX-New York from New York’s JFK Airport, where she reported that the Israeli Navy had towed the “Spirit of Humanity,” not directly to Port Ashdod but on a circuitous route, bypassing the Gaza Coast. This, she said, suggested that the Israeli Navy is engaged in activity that they do not want observed off the Gaza Strip, known to be the site of billions of dollars worth of natural gas reserves.

San Francisco bus fares will go up and service will go down - impacting Blacks more than any other group - as the struggle over who gets stimulus funds continues. Transit authorities around the country are in line for token stimulus funds, but only for new building projects; no immediate operating support to stave off fare hikes, service cuts and layoffs.

We now know where a lot of coltan and cassiterite stolen from Congo go, in the end. They go to Ghana and other parts of Africa as toxic electronic waste, often disguised as charity: European and North American "contributions" of worn-out, broken, no longer fashionable tech garbage.

Lennar, when will you stop stirring up all that radioactive asbestos in the Hunters Point Shipyard into the air that all the fine people of color in Bayview Hunters Point are obliged to breathe in order to live?

Cobalt is essential to our military industries’ ability to manufacture the modern weapons of war. So, the Congo War, a.k.a. the African holocaust, is a war for the sake of war itself.

In March 2008, the Jewish Community Federation arranged San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's all-expense paid junket to Israel, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel.

The Congolese people continue to suffer staggering casualties in the ongoing African holocaust, which has cost between 5 and 6 million Congolese lives since 1996, and which continues to cost 45,000 lives a month.

The corporate press, and the U.S. State Department, are awash in propaganda about the Congo War, also known as the Congo crisis, or, the...

The war in Congo is a U.S. proxy war; the U.S. uses Kagame, the Rwandan army and terrorist Gen. Laurent Nkunda as their African proxy force in Congo, but this is war. It has been the deadliest, though barely reported, war on the planet for years.

I know no honest, informed Congo watchers who doubt that Gen. Laurent Nkunda and his ruthless militia are tools of the U.S. and its African proxy, Rwanda, in the imperial resource war now raging in Eastern Congo.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the green heart of Africa. The country has the second largest rainforest in the world. It is resource rich but plagued with humanitarian crises resulting from the plundering of the DRC's mineral resources are severe.